Week Ten at The Iron Yard

September 10, 2015

Week one of final projects is down! This has by far been the most stressful week of my time here. My partner and I spent almost 60 hours at school working on this thing. It’s a monster.

RoadTable

My final project is an iPhone app called RoadTable. It’s for people embarking on road trips to find cool restaurants along their route. Before your trip, you tell it your route and it returns the top restaurants that aren’t too far off your path. As you get near your stop, it reminds you and helps you navigate to it. That’s the plan at the moment, anyway. There are some pretty huge challenges for a project like this. The obvious one being we have to write everything in Swift and use Xcode. Neither of us had much or any experience in iOS development. We’re teaching ourselves how to make this app as we’re making it. It’s been incredibly difficult to get even basic things to work. We’ve needed every one of the 60 hours we’ve put in. But we’re committed and we’re making great progress.

Learning a New (Programming) Language

Since I had already learned some JavaScript before learning Ruby I know a little bit about what this is like. I keep trying to do things in Swift the way I do them in Ruby. Let me set class variables! Why is parsing JSON so hard? I need to start letting Swift work the way it wants to. However, there definitely are some similarities among most languages that have helped. I haven’t had much trouble writing useful functions or setting and using variables. Looping over arrays and hashes has been relatively painless because I’ve done so much of that in Ruby. My point is that most of the core ideas are very similar, but the way you use them can be very different. It’s important to use the language the way it’s meant to be used. Otherwise you’ll end up fighting it. And it will win.

Weekend Thoughts

This has been a long and stressful week and I expect next week will be the same. I’m having fun though. This line of work has many ups and downs but when you hit a really good up, you forget the downs even happened.